Comeback of the French GP: a dinosaur returns

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Comeback of the French GP
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D he GP France was a founding member of the formula 1. On July 2, 1950, the sixth World Championship round in history took place in Reims. And since then, with one exception, always until 2008. The exception was the year 1955. After the Le Mans accident with 82 dead, all racing events in France were canceled.

Otherwise, France was a constant on the GP calendar . A season without a run in the country where the first car race took place in 1894 was inconceivable. And yet it happened. In 2008 the last French Grand Prix so far took place in Magny-Cours. Magny-Cours surrendered to the ever increasing entry fees. Other organizers didn't want to step in.

With Paul Ricard there was only one other Formula 1 race track, and that belonged to Bernie Ecclestone. He made more money renting out the former GP course for test drives. He knew that he could never finance a Grand Prix on his own ground. All the stands had already disappeared. Building new ones would have cost too much money.

The end of Magny-Cours

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The last French winner was Felipe Massa - 2008 in Magny Cours.

At the end of the last decade, French motorsport was in crisis. In 2008 there was only one French Formula 1 driver with Sebastien Bourdais and a flagging French team with Renault. Gone are the days when you had Alain Prost, a world champion, with Jacques Laffite, Patrick Depailler, René Arnoux, Patrick Tambay and Didier Pironi, GP winners and always five or six drivers in the field when there were teams from Matra and Ligier , Prost, Larrousse and AGS. The Grand Nation disappeared from theScreen.

Nobody wept a tear after Magny-Cours. The route in the province was demanding from a driver's point of view, but boring from the viewer's point of view. In the flat country halfway between Paris and Lyon, no atmosphere wanted to arise. The whole area exuded the charm of a go-kart track that was too big. It was only on the calendar because French politics wanted it that way. The provincial princes had good connections in the Champs-Élysée.

Magny-Cours was the seventh host of the French GP. And what kind of race tracks were there on offer. Initially, the home of Formula 1 was the high-speed track in Reims. The 8.3 kilometer long triangle in Champagne fought with Spa-Francorchampos and Monza for the title of the fastest GP course.

Reims, however, was not seeded. The organizing ACF awarded the Grand Prix every now and then to Rouen, a mountain and valley railway on public roads on the outskirts of the city in Normandy. But there was a lot of blood on Reims and Rouen. Both tracks claimed numerous victims, not only in Formula 1. 1966 was over for Reims and two years later for Rouen.

The real 'little Nürburgring'

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From 1965 Clermont-Ferrand became a Formula 1 circuit. Here is the start of the 1972 French GP.

In 1965 Clermont-Ferrand came to kiss the hand. A monster of a racetrack. If there ever was a location that deserved the name “small Nürburgring”, it was the 8.055 kilometer circuit in the mountains of the Massif Central. 51 turns sounds like slow driving. In fact, the Circuit d‘Auvergne was extremely fast and just as dangerous as Reims and Rouen.

1972 was over. Helmut Marko lost an eye. A rock shot from Ronnie Peterson's Lotus hit his helmet and pierced the visor. The narrow shoulder to the left and right of the track were littered with loose volcanic rock.

In 1967 the Grand Prix went to Le Mans for political reasons. Formula 1 drove on the 4.4 kilometer long Bugatti variant, which from the point of view of the time was a retort track. The Grand Prix on the 24-hour site was a letdown. Only 20,000Viewers wanted to see him.

It was a unique experiment. Another never happened. In 1970 Albi's Formula 2 course was supposed to be awarded the contract, but the organizer was only able to raise a quarter of the required guarantee of 800,000 francs. That is why the circus returned to Clermont-Ferrand.

A year later, the premier class made a guest appearance on a racetrack that showed motorsport the way into the future. Paul Ricard appeared to the participants just like a wonderland like 38 years later the Yas Marina Circuit in Abu Dhabi. The liqueur millionaire Paul Ricard's facility, modeled in a lunar landscape, pampered the mercenaries in the cockpits with huge run-out areas, safety fences and a state-of-the-art pit system. An ultra-fast S-curve after the start and finish, the 1.8-kilometer Mistral straight and the Signes full-throttle curve after it. 15 years after the debut, the Formula 1 cars were again too fast for this route. The fatal accident of Elio de Angelis during test drives in 1986 forced the organizers to make a short connection. She ignored the death S at the end of the home straight and shortened the run up to the Signes curve to 900 meters.

The shortest lap time in history

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Dijon changed quarreled with Paul Ricard for a while. Here is a picture from 1984.

Because change was routine in France, Paul Ricard took turns with Dijon-Prenois for 10 years . At the premiere, the route in Burgundy was a little short. The 1974 Grand Prix on the 3.289 kilometer long but quite demanding track went down in history. For the first time, a lap time was less than a minute. Niki Lauda put his Ferrari on pole position with 58.79 seconds.

For the second appearance in Dijon an expansion had to be made. A loop with a breathtakingly steep uphill section extended Dijon to an acceptable 3.8 kilometers. Trouble with the idiosyncratic track owner Francois Chambelland drove the GP circus out of Dijon after 1984. The days were numbered for Paul Ricard too. 1990 took place thereheld a Grand Prix for the last time. From 1991, Bernie Ecclestone only stopped at Magny-Cours.

In December 2016, the French Automobile Club confirmed the comeback of the Grand Prix in Paul Ricard. The contract runs for 5 years. The financing is provided by the Provence-Alpe-Côte-d‘Azur region, the Var district, the city of Toulon and the French automobile association FFSA. It is hoped that tourism will bring the prestige project around 65 million euros into the region.

Since 2009, the route operator has been building spectator seats again. In a first construction project, a main stand for 4,400 spectators and natural spaces for more than 10,000 visitors were created in the Signes and Beausset curves. The route itself has been massively defused compared to the original version. The full-throttle meandering La Verrerie has given way to a narrower chicane.

A braking curve interrupts the Mistral straight on two times 900 meters. The double right of Beausset received a new line management. Not much remains of the former lunar landscape. The course is set out in the middle of a huge asphalt surface. Colors show where the route ends and the run-off zone begins.

In the gallery we once again show you some pictures from the eventful past of the French GP.

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